Under the Ice

by Gisa Klönne

  ‘Leave me alone.’ His voice is a squeak – a far cry from the calm, self-confident manner he had practised with the bearded counsellor his mother had dragged him to when he’d come home from school in tears every afternoon.

  ‘What’s little Stinker getting so worked up about? We aren’t going to hurt him.’ Lukas’s voice is soft, almost friendly. ‘Do you think he doesn’t like us?’

  ‘He has a guilty conscience,’ says Viktor.

  Now they’re all talking at once. ‘What’s he been doing this time?’ – ‘Has he been talking again?’ – ‘Has he been grassing to the cops?’ – ‘Look, he’s going to cry, the little toady; he’s going to pee his pants.’

  Viktor grabs Tim by the chin and buries his fingers in his neck. At once the others fall quiet. Even worse than the physical contact is the boys’ hatred. Abruptly Viktor lets go of Tim, wiping his hands on his jeans as if they were dirty.

  ‘Rinker Stinker’s a peeping Tom!’ he says, sounding almost sad. ‘A peeping Tim! Tell us what you were doing with your binoculars at the quarry pond yesterday, you horny little wanker.’

  ‘I’m not a wanker!’

  ‘Oh no? Lukas saw exactly what you were doing. Staring at the girls’ boobs. You get yellow fingers from wanking.’

  Tim looks at his hands. ‘I wasn’t wanking.’

  The boys laugh. ‘He looked! God, he’s so stupid, he believes it and all!’ – ‘Rinker is a wanker!’ – ‘If he can find his thingy.’ – ‘Come on, Stinker, show us what you’ve got.’ – ‘Come on, pull your shorts down!’

  As one, they close in on Tim.

  ‘Leave me!’ His attempt at a shout fails miserably. They’ve got him. They can do what they like with him, and he deserves it all; he was stupid enough to walk into their trap, wasn’t he?

  They grab him and hold him firmly. They pull down his shorts and underpants, and a hand grasps him by the balls and squeezes. The pain sends tears shooting to Tim’s eyes.

  ‘Go on – cry, you wanker!’ They laugh and fumble around with him. Tim closes his eyes. He doesn’t put up a fight; he makes himself all limp, prey succumbing to its predators. ‘Quick, your phone, take a photo!’ – ‘No, a video.’ – ‘What a small dick – no wonder he has to go peeping.’ – ‘Don’t you dare peep at the girls again, and don’t you dare tell on us, Stinker, or you’re in big trouble.’

  Then it’s over; they vanish as suddenly as they came. But Tim can’t open his eyes or pull up his pants and shorts. He stands there as if riveted to the spot, pressing himself harder and harder against the railings. I’m not here, is all he thinks – not here. None of that just happened.

  Far away, an eternity later, the school bell announces the end of the sixth lesson. Other students – or a teacher – might walk past and see him standing here with his pants down. The realisation jolts Tim out of his paralysis. The factory, he thinks – Jonny’s secret hiding place. I’ll be safe there. He lumbers awkwardly along the railings to the bike yard where that morning, in another life, he left his mountain bike.

  *

  Languid turquoise waves lap on the sand. Georgian Bay, the light-blue patch on the map, is vast in reality too. A sea, Judith thinks. Or a mirage. She crouches down, dips her hand in the water and licks it, but it isn’t salty; it really is a freshwater lake, stretching all the way to the horizon. It’s warm, and she’s alone. In Cologne it’s already afternoon, but here the day is new, the sky cloudless, the water pleasantly refreshing. All the same, she gets back in the car. The village of Cozy Harbour, about three kilometres down a gravel track, is less spectacular than the lake. A few brightly coloured wooden houses, a supermarket with a petrol station, a Red Cross station and a restaurant on a shoreside promenade where a few seagulls are fighting over the remains of a hamburger. Fishing boats, expensive-looking yachts and a water plane bob up and down at the harbour landing stages. A man in jeans is balanced on one of the skids of the plane, his head inside the cockpit. Judith parks the car and teeters towards him along a silvery wooden jetty.

  ‘Hi, I’m looking for Terence Atkinson.’

  The man leaps onto the jetty beside Judith with apparent ease. ‘Deutsch?’

  She looks at him in astonishment.

  ‘Sorry, I just thought – your accent.’ He smiles.

  ‘I am from Germany, yes.’

  ‘My old homeland. David Becker – Trips to the Wilderness. Welcome to Cozy Harbour.’

  His hand is warm and slightly rough, and clasps Judith’s hand neither too firmly nor too limply, but just right. That’s how a handshake should be, Judith thinks – or then again, maybe not, because it’s as if there’s something emanating from his hand – a kind of force field, a burning sensation, like when she deals the tarot cards.

  She withdraws her hand; David Becker lets it happen. An amused, possibly puzzled smile dances in his eyes – and something else, something darker. Life has scored lines in his face, and his hair looks as if too much sun has partly bleached out the light-brown colour. Judith feels the absurd desire to stroke this man’s face, to touch him, feel his hands, his arms around her – feel that burning sensation again. Goodness, how tacky can you get? Pull yourself together, Judith. You’ve only just met this man. For all you know, he might have a wife and five children waiting for him in one of these peeling wooden houses; he might be a criminal, he—

  ‘Old Martha’s Cottage,’ says David Becker, pointing into the blue. ‘That’s his holiday house. It’s about a mile outside Cozy Harbour, you just have to follow the track out of the village. The third turning on the left leads down to the bay, where you’ll find the cottage.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Judith breathes. Tacky or not, her body is signalling with almost painful intensity that she would like to be close to this stranger – that it would bring happiness, a sense of security, if only for a few hours or a night.

  ‘Hang on!’ David Becker wriggles into the cockpit and disappears inside. A moment later he leaps back onto the jetty. The last time with Martin – the last time they’d hugged, had sex – how long ago was that? It used to seem easy to hug a stranger, but over the last few years she’s lost that sense of ease. Why is the desire returning now?

  ‘Here’s our brochure, in case you need a guide. My phone number’s on the back.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I must be on my way.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She walks back over the weathered planks, amazed that her body obeys her. Is he watching her go? She doesn’t turn round – doesn’t want to know, because the uncertainty seems more bearable than the sight of an empty jetty or David Becker’s back. His voice catches up with her when she gets to the hire car.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  He’s standing exactly where she left him a few seconds ago.

  ‘Judith.’

  He nods and raises a hand. She waves back, starts the car and is still smiling when Cozy Harbour has vanished from the rear-view mirror and she is turning into the bumpy drive that leads to Terence Atkinson’s holiday house.

  *

  Waiting. Waiting for the day to pass – the heat, the light. Waiting for the last fishermen down by the river to pack up and go home to their televisions and beds. Elisabeth is sitting motionless in her kitchen. Will she have the strength to go through with her plan? What will happen to Barabbas if she makes a mistake? The newspaper is still lying open on the table; the boy and his dachshund stare out at her. Elisabeth closes her eyes, conjuring up Sunday morning again. She’d walked a long way out, further than she’d been for a long time. Once they’d put Frimmersdorf behind them, she’d let Barabbas off the lead. He’d run into the woods; she’d followed him. Then she’d heard him growling.

  Is that what happened? No, it wasn’t like that. There was something else – a noise. There was somebody there. The boy in the paper? No, not the boy. Somebody else. But who? However hard she tries, she can’t remember.

  As the day approaches its end,
the light softens. Elisabeth leans on the kitchen table and heaves herself up. The dizziness comes and goes; her back shrieks. She forces herself to keep breathing until the pain is bearable. She shuffles to the fridge and eats some of the strawberries she picked in the morning. Barabbas needs to stretch his legs and do his business; later, when it’s dark, she won’t be able to take him with her. There’s the shopping to be done too.

  Elisabeth holds Barabbas on the lead. He trots along willingly at her side, and she pulls the shopping trolley behind her with her other hand. It was a long time before she could bring herself to use this present from her daughter. ‘A granny trolley,’ she had protested, ‘I don’t need one of them; I’m not that old.’ But Carmen had refused to take the present back, and before long Elisabeth couldn’t manage without it.

  For Barabbas’s sake, Elisabeth loops round to the playing fields when she’s finished her shopping. Behind the fields, the power station blocks the view – a hissing colossus of steel and stone, close enough to touch. Clouds of steam puff out of the cooling towers into the sky. O Lord, how beautiful Thy world is! it says on a stone cross beside the football pitch. Elisabeth has read the inscription so many times, but today she suddenly wonders which was there first – the cross or the power station – and what the crucifix with the suffering Christ means here, in the shadow of the cooling towers. Oh yes, she thinks, the world is beautiful, but we humans are destroying it – destroying what God gave us, because we can’t get enough. We want more electricity, more money, more land – more and more and more – and it will be the ruin of us.

  Here, so close to the power station, she can hear the constant wail of the sirens, the rumble and shriek of the conveyor belts as they shunt the brown coal along, the constant hum of the transformer. She used to hear that hum even sitting in her garden. She and Heinrich had put up with it and learnt to live with it, because the power station provided Heinrich with work, and paid for their house and garden, and Frimmersdorf, a place dominated by slagheaps, ended becoming home to them, in spite of the ugliness of its scarred surroundings. After a time they stopped hearing the hissing and humming and buzzing and wailing of the power station, and learnt to limit their view to the garden and the river – and to the areas outside Frimmersdorf, where nature had, in spite of everything, been reclaimed and restored from the disfigured state it was left in by mankind and machines.

  ‘Frau Vogt?’ A man’s voice brings Elisabeth back to reality. Confused, she turns away from the cross. One of Heinrich’s former colleagues is standing in front of her, looking at her in concern. ‘Everything all right with you?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I was just lost in thought.’

  ‘It’s the heat. Hard to know where to put yourself. The best place is down by the river, I find.’

  He raises his fishing rod in a wave and heads off to fish. Elisabeth follows slowly. He’s gone grey, she thinks. He used to dash around on his moped and make eyes at the women. Now he goes on foot.

  In a flash, the memory is back – the long seconds before Barabbas began to growl in the woods. In shocked horror, Elisabeth claps her hand to her mouth. There was a man. How could she have forgotten? Or had she repressed it? A man – she suddenly sees him before her again. A good deal younger than Heinrich’s former colleague, and yet something about the man she’s just seen reminded her of him, rekindled the memory.

  It is only a similarity, only a vague similarity, she thinks, trying to calm herself. Go home and wait for it to get dark. See through what has to be seen through; you’ve got enough to do, dealing with that.

  But the images refuse to be shaken. Someone was in the woods on Sunday morning – a man she’d seen before. In Frimmersdorf. Or is she imagining things? No, she’d seen him before, she’s sure of it. The longer she thinks about it, the more certain she is that, this time, her sieve-like memory isn’t playing tricks on her.

  *

  Old Martha’s Cottage looks as if it’s posing for a brochure published by the Canadian tourist board. Against a backdrop of turquoise water, a solitary white stone house is huddled on the banks of a natural basin. But the woman who opens the fly-screen door to Judith doesn’t smile like someone in a tourist-board brochure, especially when Judith asks to speak to Terence Atkinson. Her husband is in Montreal, she replies brusquely and, in any case, he doesn’t like being disturbed on holiday. No, she’s never heard the name Charlotte Simonis; she doesn’t know the person in the photo Judith shows her. But she does divulge her husband’s mobile number before disappearing back into the cottage, from where the muffled cries of quarrelling children are now emerging.

  Judith steers the hire car back onto the gravel track. She dials Terence Atkinson’s number, reaches his voicemail and asks him to call her back. She looks down at the white cottage. It wasn’t hard to find, but that doesn’t mean Charlotte came here. Perhaps she hadn’t understood the loon postcard as an invitation after all; perhaps Charlotte’s desire for Atkinson is all a figment of Judith’s imagination. Judith thinks of David Becker on the jetty – of the woundedness she thinks she read in his eyes, and the strange feeling of familiarity. How can she desire a man she’s only spent five minutes with? Why this feeling that her life is incomplete without him? She must be nuts. Better hope it’s the jet lag.

  Judith stares at the gravel track. Should she take a left and see if the Atkinsons have neighbours who know something about them? Drive back to Cozy Harbour and show Charlotte’s photo around? Carry on to Parry Sound where the next police station is? Hope that Atkinson rings soon and can tell her where Charlotte is? These are all possibilities – all sensible steps in an investigation. She puts her foot on the accelerator and steers the car to the right, back towards Cozy Harbour. The drive seems longer than on the way there – too long, although she’s driving faster. She parks by the harbour, exactly where she parked three-quarters of an hour ago, and gets out of the car. Boats, seagulls, silent houses. Water, glinting in the midday sun. The water plane is still there, but the jetty is empty. You idiot, she tells herself silently.

  ‘Judith.’

  She turns round in a calm sweeping movement, because it’s his voice. He’s standing outside a squat house, painted blue.

  ‘I had to come back.’ Her voice is husky.

  ‘Yes.’

  She steps closer, walking on cotton wool, like in a dream. Carefully, as if she were a timid animal, he takes her hand.

  Again she feels the warmth, the strange sense of security.

  ‘I wanted to come back,’ she says, correcting herself – wanted to feel light again, although it hardly seems possible – I don’t know why. But of course, she can’t say that.

  ‘I’m booked on a flight in three hours. But until then we could . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  Inside, the blue house is flooded with midday light. The bare boards are shiny with wear. Pale canvas blinds hang at windows facing the harbour. There are kitchen units, a desk, a sitting area and an open door leading to a second room with a big bed. They stand at the door, still hand in hand. Like Hansel and Gretel, thinks Judith. Lost children, full of hope.

  ‘Wait.’

  David Becker opens a cupboard, takes out clean sheets and makes up the bed. Judith leans against the wall and watches him. I want this, she thinks, although it frightens me. I can’t go now. Something has come to an end, something new is beginning. Maybe that’s why I’m here.

  His body against her body, his hands on her skin, gentle and easy as a summer breeze. The smell of his skin, faint and yet overwhelming. The slight taste of salt. Warm breath. Heat making her body soft, making it melt and glow.

  They don’t talk as they feel their way along each other’s limbs. Home, Judith thinks, when – after how long? – David enters her. And then she stops thinking altogether and there is nothing but desire and heat, and it feels like happiness.

  *

  ‘Went evvywhere, I did,’ the man in the hospital bed mumbles. ‘Shpain, Turkey, It’ly Russia – ev
vywhere.’

  Manni isn’t sure what to say. He’s at a loss. He is even less sure whether this seriously sick man who is his father – and who, against all prognoses, recovered consciousness earlier today – is more likely to be distressed or pleased if he takes his hand in his.

  ‘Evvywhere.’ The sick man’s lips are cracked. With every word, bubbles of whitish saliva froth in the corners of his mouth. His eyes are fixed on Manni. Manni moves his chair a little closer to the head of the bed. A bloody awful day is nearing its end. A bloody awful day that was little more than a bloody awful dead end. Still no sign of Jonny and his dog; it’s as if the earth has swallowed them up. No one’s come forward with useful information. Jonny’s stepfather is sticking to his statement that he went for a walk by himself on Saturday afternoon. He’s nervous, but that’s all; so far they haven’t been able to prove that he ever behaved inappropriately towards the dachshund, let alone that he mistreated it. Jonny’s best friend Tim is ill, and his rich pampered mummy has refused point blank to let the police anywhere near his sickbed. Meanwhile the forensic situation in Königsforst is deteriorating by the hour. If the dog squad were to find something after all this time, it would be little short of a miracle. And as if that weren’t enough, there was the fiasco with Miss Cat’s Eyes yesterday evening. He didn’t even manage to get her name off her.

  Manni can’t bring himself to take his father’s hand. He feels empty. A mutilated dachshund, a panic-stricken boy, a few drops of blood and a baseball cap. The longer he thinks about it, the more certain he is that Jonny is dead. Earlier today he came across Millstätt and Thalbach talking about him in the lobby at headquarters; he heard his name clearly. The way they changed the subject as he approached and their exaggerated chumminess when they told him to have a nice evening were by no means reassuring. They’re going to take the case away from me, he thinks. They won’t let me back on the murder squad. Meanwhile old Krieger’s living it up in Canada, unaffected by transfer measures of any kind. Quite the contrary: Little Miss Brainy’s return is eagerly awaited in Division 11.